72507 KOBIETA Z WOMEN AUXILIARY AIR FORCE (LUB WATS)

Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF for short) is a British female auxiliary service in the British Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. This service was established in June 1939, and it reached its greatest number in 1943, when it numbered approximately 180,000 people. It is worth adding that in the summer of 1939, it hardly numbered 2,000 women. The main tasks of the WAAF members included, inter alia, the surveillance of the barrier balloons, but the tracking, controlling, marking and transmitting information at special command points, which information came from the British radar network. The latter task saw the members of the WAAF play a very large, though often unnoticed, role in the British victory during the Battle of Britain in 1940. It is worth adding that the women serving in the WAAF did not pilot airplanes and did not fight as members of flight crews, e.g. during bomb expeditions over Germany. After the end of World War II, the WAAF was largely demobilized, and by 1949 only a few hundred of its members remained in service.